Sue's Quilt

Sue designed this quilt and wanted it quilted in a particular way - straight lines.  She will then hand quilt circles of various sizes over the whole surface.  I am looking forward to seeing the finished product. 

 

 

The she asked her friend to test the pattern for her and asked me to do "any" all over design on it.  So I did my version of swirls and feathers since I haven't done that for awhile.

Irish Mist

Carol made a beautiful Irish Mist quilt for her daughter and asked me to quilt it for her.  These are the projects I love - custom quilting! 

 

 

From Dinner Napkins

Kristie gather up the napkins used at her cousin's wedding and made a quilt with them.  This quilt has a very traditional look to it so feathers are in order.  Also a motif for the "negative" space of the neutral space between the colours of the "flowers".  We are both pretty pleased with the way it turned out so her cousin should love when she receives it for Christmas.

 

Arizona

Brenda made a quilt for her bed at her place in Arizona.  Of course the pix I took of the entire quilt top did not turn out, but here are a few close ups of the quilting.  It's a very colourful quilt and not "traditional".  As I was quilting it, I kept thinking "Arizona" - sunny.  Nothing traditional about this quilt!

 

 

The Last Word on Dorothy's Quilt

I love to see "my" quilts with their final owners.  Dorothy gave her quilt to her cousin Donna, who sent these pix of it on her bed.  Looks pretty awesome if you ask me! 

 

Ladybugs and Dragonflies

I've been quilting some fabulous quilts in the past few weeks. Some of them are included in this post.

Insects seem to be popular!  Kristie did a ladybug quilt and I used dragonflies as a quilting motif in one of my quilts.  I'll include a tutorial on how I did those if you're interested. 

First up is a little quilt I made - paper airplanes.  I wanted to quilt it such that the planes look like they are blasting through space.

 

 

 

This is another of my quilts - made for my daughter-in-law's mother, who likes to get manicures.  DIL also told me that her mom really likes dragonflies.  Since I was using solids, I decided to incorporate dragonflies into the quilting.  

 

 

 

This would be a "modern" quilt because of the use of solids and the not traditional block design.  Typically I would quilt something like this with a more modern style of quilting, but because I was using dragonflies as a motif, I thought something more whimsical would be appropriate.  I put a dragon fly on each bottle to sort of look like a label or logo - and I placed dragonflies in the border. 

 

 

Here's how I did the dragonflies:

 

First I found a few illustrations of dragonflies using Google (one of the best quilting tools!), then I right-sized them and printed them and cut them out. 

 

 

Each time I wanted a dragonfly, I chose the one I wanted to use, then drew around it using an air soluble marker.

 

 

 

This provides and outline or "skeleton".  From there - it's all freehand, baby!  It's like drawing with thread.   I stitched around the dragonflies three or four times so they show up a bit.

 

 

 

I echoed around the border dragonflies, then filled in around them.

 

 















As for the ladybugs, I used a very similar process:

 

First I drew a registration line in the direction I wanted the bug to face.  This is the bug's centre line.



 Then I placed my 2 inch circle template in the desired spot using the line as the centre and stitched around the template - twice - so the bugs will show up a bit.

 

Next - stitch the "V" shape for the wings.  I used a little straight line ruler to do that.  The centre line is used again as the centre for the "V".  (Stitch this twice as well.)

The head is next - again oriented on the centre line.  Again - stitch twice.

Finally - stitch the antenna - twice.  Voila!  Ladybug!

 

This is the way the pattern showed the quilt being quilt.  Meanders, flowers and ladybugs.